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Jon Bird was 4 years old, playing in a park with other kids, when a man approached and offered him a shining coin to follow him into the woods.

“It was half a crown. More money than I had ever seen,” recalls Bird, now 56.

Once out of sight from the others, the man raped Bird.

Bird remembers being confused and crying as he ran to tell his mother, who promptly put him in the bathtub. She said if anyone ever tried touching him again, he should scream and run. She also said he should forget about the attack and never talk about it.

The police were never called. Bird never saw a doctor or a therapist. The rape was swept under the rug.

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“I came from a well-to-do middle-class family. My mom was 45 when she had me and I was the third child,” he says, adding that his mother came from a posh background and was a “hands-off” parent.

“She didn’t want to deal with it.”

A lot of England didn’t want to deal with child sex abuse.

Bird’s tale is now being echoed across the United Kingdom by the thousands. The stories suggest systemic sexual abuse of children and generations of police, parents and government officials who did nothing — or, worse, who covered up the crimes.

After decades of silence, victims are raising their voices together to say “Enough is enough,” and demand their cases get heard, their assaults get investigated and someone be brought to justice.

There are an astounding 18 child sexual abuse inquiries and investigations currently underway in the United Kingdom — everything from a sweeping, national probe into allegations of mass cover-ups to murder probes and investigations into the police themselves.

The latest, launched by the British government last July and led by New Zealand judge Lowell Goddard, is examining long-standing accusations that the most powerful public officials consistently ignored child sex abuse claims due to the prominence of the perpetrators.

In the relentless series of scandals — from serial attacks by TV personality Jimmy Savile to systemic sexual abuse of boys in Manchester by former MP Cyril Smith to allegations of years of depravity at Westminster covered up by members of Margaret Thatcher’s government — one has to wonder: who knew what and when and why didn’t they speak up?

Television personality Jimmy Savile is seen with a group of under-privileged children in 1973. After his death, it was revealed he had abused hundreds of children during hospital and school visits. (Douglas Miller/Hulton Archive/GETTY IMAGES)

The scale is staggering. Savile alone is linked to approximately 450 assault complaints, according to police probe Operation Yewtree. It has been reported that at least 144 complaints against Smith were dismissed by authorities over four decades. Manchester police say they are still looking into 23 complaints against Smith, ranging from rape to assault. (Both men are now dead.)

It’s not just the powerful facing complaints. In the south Yorkshire town of Rotherham, police are investigating allegations that nearly 1,400 young girls — many not even teenagers — were abused by South Asian taxi drivers.

There are now so many sex abuse inquiries and investigations that the BBC has published a guide. The Savile scandal alone has four inquiries and another 14 separate abuse probes, all started (and some finished) in the last three years.

“We need people to tell their stories. The more that happens, the more children are protected. It was the secrecy and the silence that allowed Savile and Smith to get away with it for so long.”

The association helps adults come to terms with their past. Its counsellors handle about 5,000 calls a year, a number that has risen exponentially since Savile’s abuses hit the news in late 2012, a year after he died.

Many have spent their entire lives trying to forget what happened. Many thought no one would believe them, Bird says. Who would listen to a story about children in group homes being pimped out to be raped by pedophile rings by the people who were supposed to be caring for them?

“Before, the abuse was from stepdad or granddad or it was in the home done by someone known or trusted to the family,” says Bird. “Now, this is extreme stuff and the consequences of those who have to live with it are immense — no secure attachments in early childhood, severe mental health problems, eating disorders, self-harming, addiction problems and suicide.

“In a way, it is good those who have had these experiences can talk about it, because in the past they thought no one would believe them.”

From afar, news of the scandals and abuse inquiries must make it seem as though all of Britain is awash with pedophiles, he acknowledges.

“For people like yourselves, it does look like the whole country is riddled. I think it is just a huge backlog coming through all at once. But that backlog was allowed to develop. People like Savile and Smith felt they were above the law.”

Jimmy Savile and the entertainers

The custody photograph of former pop star Gary Glitter, who was convicted in February of six offences of sexually abusing schoolgirls between 1977 and 1980. (METROPOLITAN POLICE SERVICE)

The sexual abuse by Savile, a platinum blond, cigar-chomping, former dance hall DJ, spanned 60-plus years, from the mid-1940s to Savile’s death in 2011 at age 84.

It seems no one was safe from Savile. The host of the TV music show Top of the Pops reportedly raised nearly £40 million for hospitals and charities during his lifetime. His larger-than-life persona and charity work masked sexual depravity as he moved from hospital to hospital unquestioned. He appears to have preyed on anyone — from extremely young girls and boys to the physically disabled to women in their 70s.

The earliest reported abuse happened in Manchester in 1955, according to the report on Savile titled Giving Victims a Voice, conducted by the Metropolitan Police Service and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

“The Top of the Pops was filmed here in Manchester for seven or eight years, at the BBC, before it moved to London. This is where it began,” says Duncan Craig, founder of Survivors Manchester, a support group. “Some of the things that don’t get talked about is that he abused male victims as well as females. He abused boys in Manchester.”

But Savile’s abuse went undetected until an ITV documentary in 2012 featured the claims of five women who said they were abused by Savile in the 1970s at Duncroft School in Staines during the filming of BBC shows.

Operation Yewtree followed. Even though Savile is dead, 30 detectives investigated claims against him, his friends and associates. Media reports prompted even more allegations. Six hundred people have contacted authorities with complaints, 450 directly connected to Savile and alleged sexual abuse. Most were girls aged 13 to 16 when they were assaulted.

Craig and fellow abuse counsellor Bird both say the Savile revelations were a watershed. It launched huge media coverage of sexual abuse and exploitation. The tabloid press exploded with lurid headlines almost daily.

“It is creating a landscape where people are being triggered,” Craig says. “They feel they need to get this off their chests. I think the media reporting of sexual abuse is having a profound impact on people’s silence.”

Operation Yewtree spawned investigations into celebrity public relations guru Max Clifford, BBC entertainer Rolf Harris, and radio and TV presenter Dave Lee Travis, the BBC says. Last spring, Clifford was sentenced to eight years in jail. Harris was found guilty of 12 sex acts on girls. And a jury acquitted Travis of 12 sex charges, although in September he was convicted of one count of indecent assault.

Last month, former pop star Gary Glitter, whose real name is Paul Gadd, was convicted of six sex offences, including having sex with a 12-year-old girl. Gadd, 70, was sentenced to 16 years in prison.

In 2013, broadcaster Stuart Hall pleaded guilty to 14 cases of indecent assault that took place between 1967 and 1985. Hall, whose hit show was called It’s a Knockout, was sentenced to 30 months in prison for his assaults on women and girls, the youngest 9.

Westminster and the corridors of power

A former police officer alleges that British detectives were ordered to drop an investigation into sexual abuse allegations against the late lawmaker Cyril Smith, seen in this 1986 photo. (PA file photo)

Perhaps the most notorious rumours and whispers of cover-up target the centre of British power — Westminster, the seat of Parliament.

Goddard, 66 and of Maori descent, is the third person to lead the inquiry. The previous appointees — retired British judge Elizabeth Butler-Sloss and Fiona Woolf, former Lord Mayor of London — both stepped down due to their ties to the establishment.

Since the 1970s and 1980s, there have been rumours of pedophile rings operating in Westminster, rings that included members of the military and police. Allegations of a cover-up heightened after it was revealed the Home Office inadvertently destroyed or lost 100 files looking into pedophilia rings.

The immensely popular Cyril Smith, a nearly 400-pound politician from the Manchester district of Rochdale, is one of the former MPs being investigated. Smith, who died in 2010, allegedly groomed and sexually abused vulnerable boys living in group homes.

Lord Norman Tebbit, who served under former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, caused a massive stir after he acknowledged there probably was a cover-up of politicians abusing children.

“It was almost unconscious,” Tebbit said on the BBC’s Andrew MarrShow, according to The Guardian. “It was the thing that people did.”

There are allegations of orgies with boys and teens in the 1970s and 1980s. Police are even probing the claim that three boys were murdered to hide the abuse.

Bird says old politicians learned to hide their problems and crimes while attending British private schools. “The elites who went to boarding schools — that is where they learned silence,” says Bird, who was sexually abused by a boarding school teacher in addition to being raped as a 4-year-old by a stranger.

Bird notes it is ironic that when Tebbit is questioned now, he can never seem to recall any names being mentioned concerning pedophilia.

“It was sort of played down as having an embarrassing interest in little boys. And that (knowledge) was used to control them by the party whips, ‘If you don’t vote like we want — we’ll release this to police.’ There was a mucky sense of priorities in the 1980s and 1970s,” Bird says.

Apparently, Thatcher was warned not to give Smith a knighthood due to the allegations of pedophilia. She ignored the advice.

Rotherham’s 1,400 victims

A teenage girl, who claims to be a victim of sexual abuse, is seen in Rotherham on Sept. 3, 2014. At least 1,400 children as young as 11 were reportedly sexually abused from 1997- 2013 in Rotherham. (Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

Against the backdrop of decades of abuse and cover-up is a relatively new horror: Rotherham.

Over a 16-year period, it is believed nearly 1,400 adolescent and teen girls were trafficked and sexually assaulted by a ring of taxi drivers in the South Yorkshire city of 260,000 people.

In 2010, five South Asian men were jailed for their part in seducing, intoxicating and sexually assaulting underage girls.

Then, in 2012, investigative journalist Andrew Norfolk blew the story apart when he revealed in The Times that police in 2010 were aware of thousands of these crimes, committed by South Asian gangs, but were reluctant to investigate fully for fear of appearing racist. Victims, mostly from white families, reported the crimes but the accusations often fell on deaf ears.

Young victims were picked up in taxis, taken to quiet locations and often plied with alcohol and drugs before being raped, in some instances by more than one man. The girls were told to keep silent or they would be harmed.

“It wasn’t as though (police) weren’t going after (these men) for every other kind of offence . . . but over this sexual pattern there was trepidation,” Norfolk said in an interview with The Guardianlast year.

Rotherham made the news again last month when the entire local municipal council leadership resigned after a damning report by Louise Casey, a prominent British civil servant. She concluded the council was “in denial” about what was happening.

“I want to be clear that the responsibility for the abuse that took place in Rotherham lies firmly with the vile perpetrators, many of whom have not yet faced justice for what they have done. I hope that this will shortly be rectified,” Casey’s report says.

“But in its actions the conclusion that I have reluctantly reached is that both today and in the past, Rotherham has at times taken more care of its reputation than it has of its most needy.”

Craig, founder of an abuse survivors support group, has a different view on Rotherham. He believes abuse throughout society is far more widespread than most think.

“I’ve not seen any evidence to suggest this is happening any more in Rotherham, more than in Toronto or anywhere else in the western world. What happened in Rotherham is following the initial investigation as people started turning stones over and finding truths.

“If people still are saying this is not a problem in their area than for me that is wilful neglect.”

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